Bachmann Says She Would Eliminate Minimum Wage to Spur Growth

Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann said she would stoke U.S. economic growth by cutting taxes on corporate income and capital gains and considering elimination of the minimum wage.

Corporate tax rates should be reduced significantly from a maximum 35 percent, and capital gains taxes should be eliminated, the Minnesota congresswoman said in an interview on CBS’s “Face the Nation” today. Congress should also reevaluate the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, she said.

“Whatever it takes, that’s what we need to do for job creation,” Bachmann said, adding that President Barack Obama “doesn’t seem to have an understanding of how to do the job.”

Bachmann, who plans to announce her campaign formally Monday in her hometown of Waterloo, Iowa, is nearly tied with former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney among prospective Republican challengers in a poll of likely Iowa caucus voters that the Des Moines Register published today.

Romney is the preference of 23 percent of Republican voters and Bachmann was second with 22 percent, according to the newspaper. Other candidates trailed by 12 points or more.

Bachmann said her experience founding and running a pair of mental health clinics qualifies her for the presidency.

She drew distinctions between herself and Romney over health care, citing her view that a legal requirement that Americans carry health insurance is “unconstitutional whether it’s put into place at the state level, by a state legislature, or whether it’s put into place at the federal level.”

Romney, while serving as governor of Massachusetts in 2006, enacted a healthcare overhaul that requires all state residents to carry insurance. Obama called that law the model for the federal health-care overhaul passed in 2010.

In an interview on “Fox News Sunday,” Bachmann said she would “fully repeal” Obama’s healthcare law, which she called “one of the largest spending initiatives we will ever see in our country.”

The Congressional Budget Office said the overhaul will cost $1.4 trillion from 2012 through 2021. The law’s tax increases and spending cuts, primarily in Medicare, will more than pay for its cost, the CBO said.

“I want to bring free-market policies back to healthcare,” Bachmann said in the ABC interview.